People are voting emotionally.

Good concept, poorly executed.

A Disappointing Continuation

The acting in this movie is really good.

I was just surfing the web and found this movie and I soon rented it on my pad for the weekend. I finished it today, and I thought "Oh, my God!" In a GOOD way! What I MAINLY liked about this movie is the actual storyline. I prefer a Mystery/Horror movie to a Horror/Horror movie.It actually DID convince me to be scared of my dentist, but I laughed at myself after that. I did have a book with my while I watched it so that I could cover up any shots that were TOO gore. By gore, I mean close-ups of bloody mouths, such as when Dr. Feinstone stabs Jodi in the gum and blood sprays everywhere, and we see Brooke with her tongue cut out. AND when he 'tortures' Mr. Goldblum. And in one scene, Dr. Feinstone strangles Jessica to death and gave Karan a needle, and the air bubble travels to her brain and kills her. I had to cover the screen for THAT, too. There's also a lot of swearing in this movie, "Whore" is used loads, so is "Shit" and "Fucking". Well, Sarah reminds me of myself, the fact that she had her braces off. I got MINE off a month ago and NOW a have a plate.Overall, FOR CHILDREN? Almost CERTAINLY not. The VERY STRONG gore and violent scenes are VERY LIKELY to scare children and possibly some teenagers.

I come to this as someone who appreciates these guys and is a lifelong fan of horror. It's by the Reanimator team, which means - or meant then - both shock and sendup: a dentist's perfect life goes horribly awry when he uncovers infidelity, and the psychologic damage spills over to the dentist room. He sets out to uproot foulness and spoiled purity, in our case quite literally and with some cringeworthy results.It's not what your film is about though, so much as good alignment of different layers. Suspiria has an unbelievable storyline about young ballerinas facing witching evil, but supports that with bewitching cinematic ballet in the joints. One dances off the other. In Videodrome, our reasoning tools collapse as the surrogate viewer's do inside the film, and we're both watching a film by the same name that upturns the center of consciousness. The Dracula story is about a reader's journey to meet with ancient evil, and bringing it back to our world in a way that reveals it to have been sexy and irresistible all along.Look here. The premise is tap into the dentist chair experience, probably horrible across the board, and abstract the worst fears into operatic enjoyment of the grotesque, which means soaking up passions from the air around the story. Italians were masters of that through an ingrained sense for opera and carnival (our loss in that case, is they couldn't resist the imposition of story).That is reinforced by all sorts of other decisions: two dentist rooms and both artificial-looking sets, one eerily painted over with clear , sunny skies in the walls, the second ominous with a heavy plum-colored velvet feel and supposedly inspired by La Scala (our doctor is a fan of opera). Tosca plays over scenes of hallucinated rotten teeth. That is the aria where Tosca ruminates on star-crossed fate, and directly ties into grandiose-minded inner monologues about foulness in the universe.One image that stays with me is the doctor holding a bloody kitchen knife before a pool that makes it look as if he's on a stage and about to take a bow before imaginary applause.So the slaughter we can accommodate as part of the spectacle, in fact that's the whole allure.There are at least two instances that equate the hand that torments with the hand that conducts imaginary opera, that is in itself, a hand that commands and invisibly conjures from the air. This alone reveals considerable skill (and in fact, warrants its own Sweeny Todd-type musical).Reanimator managed consistent story-tone and crescendo. Society turned the crescendo into orgiastic theater that parodied its own soap-operatic parody: the rich actually ate the poor.But, some of the victims here survive, and long enough for us to be reminded that they are human beings in horrible agony. It jerks us back out of the fantasy. The music abruptly stops and we're left with loaded feelings in front of something that requires quite a bit different response. Our inbuilt empathic machinery kicks into place. The film would have been perhaps salvageable, if our perspective of the killer was similarly jerked to the real world. He remains a 'loonie' (the actor can manage, and could have been a great Dr. Lecter).The result of what I call a poorly-centered film, in this case is that we are made to second-guess our enjoyment. We have to suddenly juggle pleasure with moral sense. It's effective because both are easy to sort through and the mind has powerful tools that allow us to make the shift and back again, many times over. But it feels exhausting and somehow unfulfilling in the end, like eating chocolate over cautionary videos of rotten teeth.

A dentist (Corbin Bernsen) goes mad when he discovers his wife is cheating on him with the pool boy. Of course, it doesn't help that he already had an unnatural obsession with cleanliness. But he's being tracked by both the IRS and two detectives, including one played by the genre favorite Ken Foree.This film attracted my attention by being brought to us by the creators of "Re-Animator". Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon are a pretty incredible team, and I've thoroughly enjoyed their body of work. Sadly, I think this one falls short of their other projects. Aside from the girl who plays Sarah, the acting is cheesy and over-the-top, the film quality is poor, and the general plot is just weak, with some sort of opera tie-in that doesn't really make sense.The real strength of this film is in the special effects and makeup. While some of the scenes aren't exactly realistic (such as the molar destruction scene), the effects crew went out of their way to be disgusting and gory, which is what makes this film memorable at all. Many people dislike tooth trauma in horror films, so this is going to leave them feeling very uncomfortable. I don't like teeth being pulled or knocked out with hammers, but the way this film presented it, I found the gore more enjoyable than disturbing.For the most part, "The Dentist" is a forgettable film and not something you need to see or own. I haven't seen "The Dentist 2" yet, but I suspect that one isn't much better. Perhaps you'd be better off with "Dr. Giggles" or "Novocaine".

The brilliance of this movie is that even a competent dentist is pretty scary. It's one of man's primal fears. This movie is the nightmarish image every kid has to go through in the waiting room. Corbin Bernsen gives a surprisingly non-lackluster performance as a crazed dentist who I guess tries to kill people but he only works on their teeth so it's not really working out. In a particularly gory scene we find so-so actor Earl Boen having his teeth completely destroyed with drills and whatnot, which I guess is the absolute worst you can do when you're a killer dentist. It's a typical Brian Yuzna situation, not well written but there's gore. The plot is shoddy and at times seems to be made up on the spot but hey, it's a killer dentist movie, we've all thought of it but they did it first.